Smith rejects traditional norms of displaying art, allowing audiences to experience a cohesive environment that feels like a space apart. The walls are either covered or projected upon. The lighting is dim, emanating soft reds and blues. The rest of LACMA’s exhibitions, like most others, consist of pieces surrounded by sparse, white walls. I was immediately struck by the utopian nature of the exhibition space itself. Her utopia doesn’t attempt a rupture from our current reality, but rather communicates with it directly. Smith operates in this mode, unafraid to acknowledge the ongoing effects of complex histories on black and feminine life. They’re sites that create or use space for communal calibration of the eyes toward both history and the future. For Muñoz utopias draw on the past, in order to confront the present. This form of utopia runs counter to what popular audiences may envision when they think of the word. Further he writes on queerness, “as a temporal arrangement in which the past is a field of possibility in which subjects can act in the present in the service of a new futurity” (16). For Muñoz, queers and people of color should imagine utopias as, “profoundly resistant to the stultifying temporal logic of a broken-down present” (13). I consult with Jose Muñoz book Cruising Utopia for a vital theory of utopia.

The exhibition interrogates who is allowed to occupy space in an unabashedly white world and how? How can black spaces be created and defended? What constitutes a black, feminine, or queer utopia? How can multiple spaces be bound together into one larger space? Smith’s exhibition Give It Or Leave It imagines a utopia that welcomes the contemplative mind of any patron passing through the corridors of the LACMA. She builds on these voices to enact a speculative exploration of space. Smith utilizes video, photography, music, and collected artifacts to perform dialogues with the likes of Alice Coltrane, the Combahee River Collective and Noah Purifoy of the Watt’s Towers.

This utopia, finally accessible in person, holds particular relevance in light of the conviction of George Floyd’s murderer. Cauleen Smith brings us a multi-faceted, multi-formatted utopia of nuanced black feminism. Among the collection of interesting exhibitions on view currently, it’s fitting that one of them would be a rather remarkable artistic utopia. Give It Or Leave It is on view at the LACMA until October 31, 2021ĭue to the Covid-19 pandemic my visit to the newly reopened Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) felt a bit utopian to me, allowing me to feel – in the words of Jose Esteban Muñoz – the then and there, or the hopefully near future in which our culture will reach collective recovery.

Cosmic view of the selected meditation